George Gordon, Lord Byron was born to Catherine Gordon of Gight and Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron on January 22, 1877, in London. He was born with a clubbed foot and raised in Aberdeen, Scotland, by his emotionally unstable mother after his reckless father ran off to France to avoid his creditors. At the age of ten, George became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale.
Lord Byron's flamboyant lifestyle led to financial problems while his far too young first sexual experiences set him on a path of attraction to partners of all ages, both female and male, including his half-sister Augusta. In the early 19th century, he traveled to Greece, an experience that shaped his poetry, politics, and worldview.
In 1812, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published, and Byron became an overnight success.
Despite his notorious behavior and a string of illegitimate children, Annabelle Milbanke agreed to marry him on January 2, 1815. His abusive nature caused her to divorce him, taking his only legitimate child, Ada, away from the terrible situation.
Having developed a passion for Mediterranean countries, he joined the Greek War of Independence. He died in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 19, 1824, from an illness contracted while fighting.
Sources: Poetry Foundation, Britannica, Poets.org
Artist: Thomas Phillips, c. 1813
Swimming with Lord Byron
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Lord Byron is the greatest writer you've never read.The biographer of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis tells the story of Britain's most glamorous and most tortured writer.He was rich and handsome. He was a swimmer and a poet. He loved both sexes. In his work he made a queer love life both thrilling and universal.He was born with a deformed right foot. An emotional hurt dating back to abuse when he was a boy also affected the man he became. But his hand moved on the page and his body in the water with ease and assurance. His is the story of transcending his disability and his childhood trauma in his verse.Byron's biography may shine a spotlight on your story too. The disappointments he felt in love, as well as the personal transformation he achieved in his work will strike a chord with anyone who is a reader, a writer, or a lover.
Byron
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Born in 1788, Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure of the Romantic movement. A prodigious poetic gift and a scandalous private life made him famous throughout Europe, and his masterpiece, Don Juan, became the bestselling work of the period. He remains one of the most storied and fascinating figures in world literature, and Matthew Bevis takes this great thinker and highlights the ideas most relevant to us today. The Great Thinkers on Modern Life Series, part of The School of Life, shows how thse wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us.
The Poet and the Vampyre
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In the spring of 1816, Lord Byron was the greatest poet of his generation and the most famous man in Britain, but his personal life was about to erupt. Fleeing his celebrity, notoriety, and debts, he sought refuge in Europe, taking his young doctor with him. As an inexperienced medic with literary aspirations of his own, Doctor John Polidori could not believe his luck.That summer another literary star also arrived in Geneva. With Percy Bysshe Shelley came his lover, Mary, and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont. For the next three months, this party of young bohemians shared their lives, charged with sexual and artistic tensions. It was a period of extraordinary creativity: Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein, the gothic masterpiece of Romantic fiction; Byron completed Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, his epic poem; and Polidori would begin The Vampyre, the first great vampire novel.It was also a time of remarkable drama and emotional turmoil. For Byron and the Shelleys, their stay by the lake would serve to immortalize them in the annals of literary history. But for Claire and Polidori, the Swiss sojourn would scar them forever.
The Life of Lord Byron
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Even by today's standards, nineteenth-century British poet Lord Byron led a wild life. In between his passionate and public love affairs with both men and women, his alleged dalliance with his half-sister, his courageous battlefield exploits in the Greek War of Independence, and his untimely death from a fatal illness at the age of 36, he managed to produce some of the most memorable poetry ever written in the English language. This biography presents a comprehensive look at Byron's life.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a fascinating portrait of nineteenth-century Europe - disillusioned and ravaged by the wars of the post-revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Our protagonist, whose breathtaking journey eerily echoes Byron's own life story, forgoes his destiny back home for the exciting unknown - the nature of humanity and the transformative effects of travel burst through the pages in four powerful cantos of Spenserian stanzas. Here is the poem that set Byron on his meteoric rise to fame in London society.
Don Juan
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Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave, and to Russia, where he becomes a favourite of the Empress Catherine who sends him on to England. Written entirely in ottava rima stanza form, Byron's Don Juan blends high drama with earthy humour, outrageous satire of his contemporaries (in particular Wordsworth and Southey) and sharp mockery of Western societies, with England coming under particular attack.
Manfred
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Manfred, a Faustian noble, is tortured by guilt over the death of his beloved, Astarte. He uses his mastery of language and spell-casting to summon seven spirits, from whom he seeks forgetfulness. The spirits are unable to control the past and thus cannot grant Manfred's plea.
Selected Poems
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Byron's free-spirited lifestyle combined with his rare poetic gift to make him one of the foremost figures of the Romantic Era. This collection of his poems, richly varied in mood and content, captures the essence of his great achievement. Among the thirty-one poems included are convivial song-like poems, love poems, travel poems, humorous and satiric poems. Shorter works such as the famous "She Walks in Beauty," "Stanzas to Augusta" and "So We'll Go No More a Roving" are well represented. Also here are important longer works -- "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Beppo," "The Vision of Judgment," all unabridged -- and lyrics excerpted from Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the play Manfred. Taken together, these are poems that draw readers quickly into the passions, humors, and convictions of a poet whose life and work truly embodied the Romantic spirit.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was the poem which brought Lord Byron public recognition. He himself disliked the poem, because he felt it revealed too much of himself. In it a young man (called childe after the medieval term for a candidate for knighthood) travels to distant lands to relieve the boredom and weariness brought on by a life of dissipation. It is thought to be a comment on the post-Revolutionary and -Napoleonic generation, who were weary of war.
Don Juan
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In his satiric poem Don Juan, Lord Byron refigures the legend as a man easily seduced by women, rather than as a dangerous womanizer. When the first two cantos were anonymously published in 1819, they were criticized for being immoral. They were also immensely popular. Byron only completed 16 cantos, leaving the 17th unwritten when he died in 1824. Don Juan is commonly considered to be his masterpiece.